Warhawk by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2021-08-03T07:54:28+00:00

The game

The cards

The Nails

He should never have got so far.

Valdor began to think ahead to a difficult possibility – a future in which, for the first time ever, he did not capture his quarry. If Fo somehow got away amid all the confusion, then the consequences did not bear thinking about. If he were taken alive by the enemy, then that was even worse. So he had to be found.

And yet the city was on the edge of capture. The enemy advance was now visible in all directions, a ring of fire that was steadily contracting, gnawing away at the softening defences and pushing ever closer to the core. Those battlefronts were already contested by armies of millions. As the hard hours passed, those millions would become tens of millions, further unbalancing an already one-sided slaughter. Time was running out.

Valdor crouched down for a moment, his long cloak draping over his knee. He let the killing edge of his spear dip a little, angling down into the darkness, glistering with a faint gold-silver light. Blood seemed to burn away from it, once the killing was done, leaving it just as pristine as ever. Amid all the squalor of the defeat, that one weapon remained pure, as hateful and stark as it had ever been.

He stared at the ground ahead of him. A thousand bootfalls had stirred the dust, blotting one another out and making the tracks unreadable. But then he wasn’t there to read trails in the ash. He was there, at an intersection of possible futures, to take a moment, to place himself in the place of the hunted, to imagine the path he must have taken.

Valdor closed his eyes, and rehearsed what he knew. He had penetrated the deceptions of the murders, the false leads running off into already conquered urban zones, the dismal procession of broken equipment and misleading ciphers. The man he hunted was good at this, maybe as good as any he had ever gone after, but the pool of locations was shrinking fast now and no living soul knew the ways of the Palace better than he did. This was his territory, the one he had scouted out and marked over decades, all the while preparing for just such an eventuality. In the brief stillness, he gauged probabilities, considered what the man required for his work, where he could get it, what path he must have taken towards it to keep himself hidden and alive.

The spear trembled a little in his grip. He opened his eyes, now certain of the route ahead. He moved out, breaking from the shadow, out along the high-strung viaducts over the chasms of roiling fire. He ran swiftly, his heavy tread making little impression on the wind-blown filth around him. His armour was silent, a masterpiece of technomancy even by the standards of his order – save for the glittering spear, he was almost invisible in the murk, all that finery concealed by the palls of ash and grime smeared over every surface.

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